Milliwatt-threshold visible–telecom optical parametric oscillation using silicon nanophotonics

Abstract

The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems. Although on-chip lasers have been implemented in specific cases, a general solution that is not restricted by limitations of specific gain media has not been reported. Here, we propose creating visible light from an infrared pump by widely-separated optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using silicon nanophotonics. The OPO creates signal and idler light in the 700 nm and 1300 nm bands, respectively, with a 900 nm pump. It operates at a threshold power of (0.9 ± 0.1) mW, over 50× smaller than other widely-separated microcavity OPO works, which have only been reported in the infrared. This low threshold enables direct pumping without need of an intermediate optical amplifier. We further show how the device design can be modified to generate 780 nm and 1500 nm light with a similar power efficiency. Our nanophotonic OPO shows distinct advantages in power efficiency, operation stability, and device scalability, and is a major advance towards flexible on-chip generation of coherent visible light. arXiv:1909.07248v1 [physics.optics]

Photonic crystal optical parametric oscillator

“…It has been recently pointed out that a pure parametric system is highly desirable for some applications. In particular, achieving squeezing on chip using a degenerate OPO has drawn a lot of interest recently[ 38 , 42 – 44 ], Moreover, it has been shown very recently that a network of coupled degenerate OPO could be implemented on chip to implement a coherent Ising machine [ 45 ], A different idea has also been proposed recently to use a degenerate OPO, as a "noise eater" 46 ], In ring resonator, there are strategies to control higher order interactions, for instance by inducing sidewall corrugation[ 47 ] or adding an auxiliary resonator [ 36 , 38 ] or implementing narrowband FWM by implementing a special dispersion profile[ 21 , 23 ]. Here, the devices operates naturally as a degenerate triply resonant OPO, although it could in principle be possible to achieve efficient cascaded interactions with some additional engineering[ 48 ] and tuning.…”

“…Essential here is engineering the dispersion of the propagating waves, in order to control the nonlinear interaction of a large number of modes. This enables soliton combs [ 20 ] or the ultra broadband generation of light[ 21 – 23 ], to make a few examples.…”

Efficient Frequency Doubling with Active Stabilization on Chip

“…The efficiency of photonic integrated circuits can be elevated by orders of magnitude through cavity enhancement, giving rise to ultra‐efficient frequency doubling, [ 1–3 ] optical parametric oscillation, [ 4–6 ] frequency comb generation, [ 7–9 ] quantum photon sources, [ 10,11 ] and quantum frequency conversion. [ 12 ] They promise future chip devices capable of classical and quantum optical processing at large scale and with high modularity.…”

Perovskite polariton parametric oscillator

“…9 Moreover, crystals in centrosymmetric space groups such as all-inorganic cesium lead halide perovskites (CsPbBr 3 ) need to break inversion-symmetry by anion substitution or other specific complex processes. [10][11][12] Despite the recent progresses achieved in various bulk whispering gallery mode-based OPOs, [13][14][15][16] the threshold powers are still relatively large, particularly the chip-scale planar OPOs, 8,[17][18][19] which hinder the road toward integrated nonlinear photonic devices.…”